Last, research shows that reading is a great way to teach kids empathy and other forms of social and emotional intelligence—if that’s true, then the act of learning to read is a path away from bullying. Try to expose children to literature about other cultures, traditions, and ways of living–that’ll ensure the biggest bang for your buck (or library card).

It’s the Huffington Post, buuut it’s still a solid meditation on how time, age, memory, and expectation can affect the experience of re-reading the book.

Interesting - at the end of the blog, he encourages others to share their experiences in re-reading old favorites… and it looks like he’s responded to pretty much everyone’s comments!

Links straight through to slide #2: The Moon Over High Street, by Natalie Babbitt (author of Tuck Everlasting). Release date March 1. Get pumped.

bibliofeminista:

Our novel, Stranger, has five viewpoint characters; one, Yuki Nakamura, is gay and has a boyfriend. Yuki’s romance, like the heterosexual ones in the novel, involves nothing more explicit than kissing.

An agent from a major agency, one which represents a bestselling YA novel in the same genre as ours, called us.

The agent offered to sign us on the condition that we make the gay character straight, or else remove his viewpoint and all references to his sexual orientation.

Rachel replied, “Making a gay character straight is a line in the sand which I will not cross. That is a moral issue. I work with teenagers, and some of them are gay. They never get to read fantasy novels where people like them are the heroes, and that’s not right.”

The agent suggested that perhaps, if the book was very popular and sequels were demanded, Yuki could be revealed to be gay in later books, when readers were already invested in the series.

We knew this was a pie-in-the-sky offer—who knew if there would even be sequels?—and didn’t solve the moral issue. When you refuse to allow major characters in YA novels to be gay, you are telling gay teenagers that they are so utterly horrible that people like them can’t even be allowed to exist in fiction.

LGBTQ teenagers already get told this. They are four times more likely than straight teenagers to attempt suicide. We’re not saying that the absence of LGBTQ teens in YA sf and fantasy novels is the reason for that. But it’s part of the overall social prejudice that does cause that killing despair.

We wrote this novel so that the teenagers we know—some of whom are gay, and many of whom are not white—would be able, for once, to read a fun post-apocalyptic adventure in which they are the heroes. And we were told that such a thing could not be allowed.

This is SO troubling! Props to the authors for speaking out about this since I can’t imagine this is the first time something like this has happened.

An associate professor of English at UNC Charlotte. Seems pretty badass. Her listed interests include

Multicultural Children’s Literature
American and British Children’s Literature
Visual Images and Children’s Literature
19th Century American Literature
Images of Slavery in Literature
Film and Popular Culture

So, basically, most of my favorite topics in Children’s Literature :) Anyway, click through to see some of the cool work she’s done/doing.

I am of the opinion that this type of program/title needs to become more of a “thing” if (a) children’s literature is to become more culturally valued and (b) education/literacy is going to be regarded as important.

In America we have the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, which doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page. Ireland just created a similar position called the Laureate na nÓg, which is like the super-coolest name ever. Anyway, that’s my two cents.